Everyone knew Ryan Adams has spent a fair amount of time hopped up on goof balls these last few years - but...Christ...

In a typically revealing interview with the New York Times, Adams has laid bare the extent of his addled past and the depths to which it has pushed him.

Says Adams:

"I snorted heroin a lot - with coke. I did speedballs every day for years. And took pills. And then drank. And I don't mean a little bit. I always outdid everybody...It's a miracle I did not die."

Wikipedia has a list of speedball casualties - they've claimed John Belushi, Layne Staley, River Phoenix, Mitch Hedberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Adams = hXc; especially considering he shunned rehab in favour of cold turkey as a method of withdrawal.

Carry on:

"I was running the risk of becoming one of those people who talks to himself all the time. I was about to walk over this line that there was no coming back from, and I could feel it. I was seeing ghosts and hearing stuff. Having horrible nightmares.

"I was creating as much distance from people as possible so that, in the event that something terrible happened, it wouldn't hurt them."

Ryan Adams next album, Easy Tiger, is out on the 25th of June. Listeners claim it marks a return to the sound heard on early records Gold and Heartbreaker.